Year of the Boar
by Ariel the Tempest
Summary: A Meiji Era AU about village life and death, and the coming of a new year. IshiIchi and IsshiKen.


**Year of the Boar**

**Rating:** PG  
**Warnings:** Character illness and death, serious angst.  
**Summary: **A Meiji-era AU about village life and death, and the coming of a new year. Because everyone looks better in kimono.  
**Dedication:** For dupidnavagog, with much thanks to Kiyala for help

* * *

The snow muffled Ichigo's footsteps on the way up the hill to the dispensary on the edge of the village, but the heavy pulse of his breath kept the pace. The drifts had been deposited by a squall the previous afternoon. He was the first to beat a path through them-a small sign of how much had changed in a month's time. During the epidemic, there would have already been a well-trodden path to the doctor's door. But this was the first day of a new year, and already things had changed.

Within, he found Uryuu diligently grinding some preparation in a pestle, something with an awful lot of ginseng from the smell of it. He had clearly been anticipating Ichigo's arrival, dressed for a walk in the snow, geta sitting ready at the door. The pestle was exchanged for a silk umbrella ("You _do_ know it's not coming down anymore?" Ichigo muttered), and they set out together into the forest that marked the edge of the village.

"I know enough to look out the window, Kurosaki." The reply had no heat to it, as Uryuu abruptly shifted his hold on the umbrella to protect Ichigo from a sudden, minute avalanche. One of the overhanging branches had just shed its heavy load of snow. Ichigo only huffed in reply.

There was a long but not uncomfortable silence between them as they made their way through the pines. It was a relief to be able to take one's sweet time, to be free from duties. The Kurosakis' shrine and the Ishidas' medical practice had always borne the responsibility of supporting the village through hard times-which was both an honor and a curse for the two families.

It was a responsibility they had both grown up with, though in their younger days they had often only seen the conflicting elements of their familial callings. Doctors, after all, are concerned with solid, verifiable fact, with the world as it is, with the living and human. And clerics are always after slippery moral truths, with what ought to be, with the dead and their Beyond. Their widower fathers, from whom they had learned their trades and their biases, had always seemed to bear out those assumptions. Ryuuken was always analytical and practical, and constantly irritated by the villagers' superstitious view of his skills; Isshin always daydreaming and philosophizing, trying to get people to see the infinite in the everyday. The two old men bickered and strove over who would hold the hearts and minds of the villagers. Or such, at least, they had thought in childhood.

The silence was finally broken when they emerged into the clearing, their abrupt appearance startling a flock of finches into chattering retreat. Ichigo held his arm out to Uryuu as they started down the hill towards the graveyard. "Grab on; I don't want to have to dig you out of a snowdrift." It was the doctor's turn to huff in annoyance now, but all the same he closed the umbrella and held on as they descended. Wisely, as it turned out: the wind had produced some loose drifts that their feet sunk deep into with every step. Praise be that the signs all said this was the last gasp of winter; spring would be a great relief.

As they reached the level ground of the graveyard, Uryuu slowed his steps to fall back behind Ichigo. The temple brat knew much more than he about how to tend to a grave...but he would take note, and next time he would not be so ignorant. His eyes took in everything as Ichigo squatted to brush the snow from the line of four markers, then took a few sticks of incense from his pocket and lit them. The snow on the two graves in the center-the fresh ones-was thin enough that he could scrape it away, and plant the incense in the frozen ground. Another silence fell as Uryuu joined him, crouching meditatively in front of their parents' graves.

* * *

The epidemic had begun four months before, brought to the village by a soldier returning home through the mountains from a stint in the garrison to the south. Karakura was the last place with an inn for quite a few miles, so he had stopped for the night. Old Shinda, who kept the inn, had attributed the soldier's shivering and fatigue to the long journey, and not thought anything more of it until the man did not wake for breakfast the next morning.

Upon discovery, Ryuuken had of course been sent for. Uryuu had gone with him out of boredom more than anything else, hoping to hear stories of the outside world from the traveler. Instead, Ryuuken had abruptly ejected him from the sickroom with a message to carry to the shrine: _Isshin, I don't care what you have to tell them, just keep people away from the inn...but don't get them panicked, either._ He had learned enough medicine at his father's knee to understand the urgency, but couldn't understand relying on the _priest_, of all people...much less calling the man by his first name. Yet Isshin hadn't seemed shocked at the instructions, only saddened and concerned. He had sent Uryuu back with another message: _Keep yourself calm and healthy too, eh 'Ken_.

The week that followed had seen everyone giving the inn a wide berth, fearful of the illness within but confident that distance would keep them safe-Isshin had done his job superbly. By the end of it, the soldier had recovered sufficiently to be hurried out of town, while the linens he had slept on were burnt and his room washed down with vinegar. Then there was a collective sigh of relief, and the village went back to its business. Ichigo might have let himself relax as well, had he not seen Ishida-sensei out in the forest, scraping the first snows of the season away to search for medicinal plants. The doctor always laid in a generous supply before the frost, so why was he suddenly looking for more?

The reason became clear a week after the soldier had left for good, when the young girl that Old Shinda paid to clean the rooms stood up from scrubbing the floor, and fainted dead away. By the next day, her aged mother was running a fever as well. Isshin, coming to offer his comfort and prayers, crossed paths with Ryuuken, taking his leave after tending to the patients. The priest murmured under his breath in passing, "I hate it when you're right, you pessimist." Ryuuken muttered back, "May you prove me wrong yet."

November ended and December began. Shinda's cleaning girl expired with Uryuu sitting at her bedside, and Ichigo took her body into the temple for burial. There was a steady trickle of new cases, and the villagers seemed to be unable to shake the illness (incubated in the close quarters of the garrison) so easily as that fateful wandering soldier. Then all at once it seemed that _everyone_ was ill, or tending to a delirious relative, or weeping over burying one. It was then that the panic seemed to become palpable, when there was no more normal left, no matter where one looked.

And the Kurosakis and the Ishidas were wherever the epidemic was, applying cold compresses and chanting over corpses, trying to hold back the tide of death and to make sense of things when it won out. Fathers and sons both felt the strain of supporting the village. Even in their sleep, they were followed by the sound of hacking coughing and of graves being hacked in the frozen ground. It fell heavier on the older generation, though, who worried that the village simply would not make it. Too few people left in the spring for planting, and the place might cease to exist in few more seasons.

It wasn't until the very end of January that Uryuu and Ichigo had enough time to reflect, and to realize that turning point had been passed. People were no longer coming down with the illness, the sick were either already gone or finally starting to recover...it was going to end, and the village was going to survive. As things began to return to their usual patterns, even Ryuuken's eyes, dark-circled from overwork, had a glimmer of hope.

His brief moment of hope ended abruptly, when a conversation with Isshin was interrupted by a fit of coughing from the priest. Ryuuken hustled him home and into bed with an uncharacteristic panic. Ichigo could scarcely believe that his unsinkable father could be _ill_, but the epidemic had already proved to be remarkably capricious about who it claimed. Two weeks later, all four of them had been in Isshin's bedroom together, Ichigo with damp eyes, Ryuuken stony-faced, and Uryuu hiding in the corner, completely unsure of what to do or say. Isshin had been drifting in and out of consciousness all day. In one of his moments of greatest lucidity, he ordered both of the boys out of the room. When they were both too stunned to comply, Ryuuken gave them a look that said, "For the love of Heaven, humor the dying man!"

As they scurried out, Uryuu and Ichigo could see hands seeking each other out, twining together as if well-accustomed.

They did not speak that night, waiting in the dark together until Ryuuken called them back in, but they did sit close enough to feel each other's warmth. It was a comforting anchor as they mulled over everything they had ever believed about how the medical and the spiritual shouldn't fraternize. For the first time, it had occurred to them that their fathers' seeming enmity could have hidden something very different from village gossip.

Isshin died a few hours before dawn. As Ichigo closed his eyes and arranged the sheet over him, Ryuuken stood up as if every bone in his body ached to the marrow. All he said to Uryuu as his son helped him walk back to their dispensary was, "I am so very tired." The tone made it an apology for some unnamed failure. He took to his bed when they got home, and did not get up again.

Ichigo and Uryuu had chosen to hold a joint burial, since the grave plots lay adjacent to each other, between the well-tended graves of their respective mothers. There had already been far too many funerals that winter, yet it still shocked them when the two of them were almost the only mourners. Where was the gratitude for faithful service? The cut was deeper still when the few villagers who had shown up to pay their respects left without any word of comfort to the two who were now responsible for the bodies and the souls of the community.

With spring only a month or two away, it seemed that they were the only two still mourning. Everyone else was engaged in the vital business of preparing for the new year, for the spring planting that would come whether they were ready or not. The realization had been painful, but necessary: for their fathers' deaths to go unsung while village life continued on was a sign of how well they had done their duties. They understood now how heavy those duties could be, and how lonely.

* * *

The sun was starting to sink behind the trees when Ichigo finally roused from his reverie, and glanced back at Uryuu. "Going to cramp your legs squatting in those sandals," he muttered, and offered a hand up. The walk back to the dispensary was as full of chatter as the walk out had been silent. Ichigo complained at length about how his sisters were entirely too young to be making eyes at the boys, Uryuu grumbled about how it was impossible to read his father's handwritten labels on the medicine jars, they bickered about entirely inconsequential disagreements. The conversation could just as easily have taken place before their fathers' deaths as after, because in village lives like theirs some things never changed.

But-as they proved when Uryuu stepped over the threshold of the dispensary, glancing back at Ichigo, and when Ichigo followed him across that threshold without a moment's hesitation-some things most certainly did.


End file.
